Well, I’m Here

90 days ago I (at the strong encouragement of my spouse) stopped floundering and started getting serious about creating a real business. As it turns out, giving yourself a deadline that you respect is a surprisingly effective tool.

As of today, I am running a growing business bringing in thousands per month. It’s definitely not the business I set out to build 2 years ago when I left private practice, but it’s a business I enjoy and see a future for. And that’s not nothing.

I mentioned to my better half the other day that the 90 days was up, and that I felt I had learned a lot over the past few months. She asked me two questions that I found very helpful:

The first was:

What are the top three lessons you learned?

The second was:

What are you going to do with your next 90 days?

The rest of this post will be about question 1. The next post will dive into question 2.

Lesson 1 - Success Breeds Success (or, Do What You Know)

One of the hardest questions in life is “where do I start?” That’s a particularly hard question when you’re starting a business, and even moreso when you’re someone like me who has some sort of weird obsession with building Amazon-like, multi-pronged empire that services every possible need and use-case.

The answer is surprisingly simple - do what you already know how to do. At the end of the day, success is the root of all progress, growth and opportunities.

You don’t necessarily need to do that thing forever - but you will create more opportunities to grow and change from a platform of success than trying to learn and figure out a bunch of new things all at once.

The company I am in the process of building is a law firm support service business that, in my wildest dreams, bundles all of a law firm’s needs into one convenient package. But you can’t be all things to all people at once. Amazon didn’t start out as Amazon - it did nothing but sell books for four years, and on the back of doing that very well started to expand.

One of my strongest current skillsets is complex legal research, drafting and file review - so I’ve started there. I’m building up a roster of law firms who are outsourcing their complex work to me, and I’m capitalizing on the reputation I built in private practice to grow a reputation for doing that well. I know it - I’m good at it - I’m achieving success with it.

Something that it took me far too long to understand was that if I do one thing really well, happy customers are far more likely to ask ‘what else can you do for me?’ when I want to expand, rather than starting from scratch offering a ton of services that (a) are confusing, and (b) I don’t have experience in or a proven track record for.

Do one thing, and do it very well. If you do that, the opportunities to expand and grow will follow. Always start from a position of strength. Success breeds success.

Lesson 2 - Tools are Over-Rated - Sell Services (or, Just Sell Me the Damn Fish, I’ll Pay Anything)

I’ve blogged about this before in Rounding the Corner; TIL www is a Subdomain - I set out to build affordable DIY legal tools for professionals and the public. What I ran into, time and time again, was something I found curious - people didn’t want to pay a reasonable subscription for unlimited use of tools that made DIY legal easier - they wanted to pay 10x more on a project-to-project basis for me to use my own tools and provide the finished product.

Since I’ve covered this before I won’t spend much time on it, but it is an interesting spin on the ’teach a man to fish’ proverb we all know and love. Particularly in tech, there’s this overarching view that what people want is cool, user-friendly tools that help them do things easier, faster, whatever - teaching them to fish, in other words.

But you know what? Most people just want the fish. And they’ll pay up for it.

Lesson 3 - Just Stick Around - (or, Most Races Are Marathons, Not Sprints)

Most wildly successful endeavours start out small and appear somewhat shitty. I remember trying Spotify early on, for example, and I was very much not impressed. Years later, I’m a subscriber. The first iPhone was similar, as was Netflix’s original offering.

Outside of tech, I’ve noticed after listening to a lot of podcasts about the entertainment industry that actors/comedians/others often have the same story - they sucked for years and years, but managed not to quit and to continue to incrementally improve until one day they seemingly became overnight success. Steve Martin’s book, ‘Born Standing Up’, is a very vivid and inspiring example.

What differentiates the ultimate winners in the long term is just the grit to stick around, weather failure, and continue to incrementally improve. The compound effect of that is amazing, given a long enough timeline.

Observing this has been a gigantic relief to me. Firstly, it has alleviated alot of the pressure of my unrealistic expectations of getting huge and successful overnight. That may happen, but it’s not going to happen to me, and that’s okay. The fact that something isn’t wildly successful in two months does not mean it’s a failure.

Secondly, it will hopefully help to give me the endurance and resilience to grind away for long periods of mediocrity. I used to get very antsy during periods in which nothing exciting was happening, as though I was missing something or doing something wrong. I now feel that much less - it’s more fun to be in periods of exciting developments and fast growth, obviously, but the real success stories are forged in the fires of extended, boring grinds. Something akin to what Seth Godin calls ’the dip’, although in a slightly different context. Same underlying lesson, though.

So What Now?

That’s for next time, my friends. What I can say is that I’m much calmer, happier, and more optimistic than I was 90 days ago.

Here’s hoping the next phase is as successful.